Interview with Amy Divaraniya, co-founder of OOVA
OOVA, a company co-founded by Dr. Amy Divaraniya, tracks hormone levels daily using a non-invasive and affordable approach in order to discover information that aids in a wide range of female health issues. Results, action plans, and reports are all accessible through a smartphone.
With a background in biology and data science, Amy decided to channel her frustrations from her own journey in growing her family into a product that can help women access personalized data about their hormone levels and know what steps they should take next. I spoke with Amy about the OOVA testing kit, the fundraising process, and how consumer feedback propelled the product into what it is today.
What gave you the motivation to start OOVA and how did you come up with the idea? I would love to hear a little bit about that journey, from partnering with your co-founder to coming up with the prototype.
OOVA was founded because I had a tough time getting pregnant. In 2016, my husband and I decided to have a baby — we expected the journey wasn’t going to be easy since we were both in our 30s, I never had regular cycles my entire life, and I’ve also been diagnosed with celiac disease, which infertility is hypothesized to be associated with. We had a difficult conversation early on, that if we didn’t conceive naturally, we didn’t want to go the invasive route. For me it was actually easier to make peace with possibly never being a mother then to go through a potential miscarriage or a failed IVF cycle. So, we started going through all the motions — I started using at home ovulation kits, I used every fertility tracking app that was available, and I took my body temperature at 4:30am every day. Luckily, 18 months later we were able to conceive, but those 18 months were the most devastating months of my life. The most frustrating part for me was that after collecting all this “rich data” for 18 months, I really was no smarter than I was on day one.
About 4 months into my journey, I became obsessed with digging into the tools available to me and figuring out how to rig them for myself. What I found was that they were all designed for women who have perfect cycles (28–32 days). If your cycle falls outside of this range or you are irregular, the products clearly state that the test results are not reliable. I’m a biologist by training, so that side of me emerged and wanted to get to the root of the problem — tracking hormone levels.
I was in the midst of my PhD and my lab was pretty diverse, composed of data scientists like me, engineers, and clinical researchers. Jerome, who is trained in mechanical engineering, happened to walk by my desk one day, and I vented my frustration about this problem. One hour later, he came back to my desk and said that he thought we could do something. We spent the rest of the day mapping out OOVA and that’s really how the idea took shape and took off. Jerome is now my co-founder and Chief Technology Officer.
OOVA has developed the first test that measures two hormones, luteinizing hormone (LH) and progesterone, using a single test strip — to provide some scientific background, can you talk about the importance of these hormones?
LH is important for detecting a woman’s most fertile days. LH levels are typically very low throughout a cycle, but it starts to elevate on specific days and that indicates when an egg is about to be released. Progesterone, on the other hand, is important for confirming that an egg has been released — levels of progesterone stay low throughout the cycle, and if an egg has been released, progesterone levels increase, and remain elevated if the egg is fertilized.
The reason that it makes sense to measure both these hormones is that they both provide useful information: LH helps to determine when the best time to conceive is and progesterone gives a woman feedback as to whether or not an egg has been released that cycle. This is really great information to have if you don’t conceive in a cycle because you can figure out if you missed your fertile window or if you just didn’t release an egg.
Two focus areas for OOVA are personalization and accuracy. Both of these attributes are becoming increasing important in the healthcare space, particularly in the world of digital healthcare. How does OOVA stand out from its competitors in these areas?
Since we are getting these quantitative measurements, the one big thing that we are focusing on is capturing what every woman’s personal baseline is for hormone levels. For example, if a woman has a reproductive health issue such as polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), her LH levels may have a very high baseline. Typical ovulation predictor kits or any of the LH tests on the market are threshold-based, so her baseline may be consistently above that threshold and she will always get a false positive. With OOVA, since we are able to figure out what each woman’s baseline is, we are able to detect fluctuations and surges in her hormones by comparing to her baseline. In this way, every test is personalized.
In one of my previous posts, I wrote about the femtech industry and its massive growth potential over the next few years. The femtech space raised $650MM of funding in 2018, a 7x increase over 2013, and is expected to reach ~$1BN in funding in 2019. (Pitchbook) Many of your direct competitors have raised millions in funding this past year yet cannot provide results that are as scientifically-backed or accurate as OOVA. Do you think there has been a slight over-hyping of the direct-to-consumer healthcare model in areas where it might realistically be a weak alternative to in person medical care?
Yes and no. Yes — I think there is a lot of noise in the space; there are a lot of products coming out that don’t really solve a problem, but they are raising awareness of a gap. So from that perspective, it is good that they are raising funds, because they are able to reduce the learning curve for both investors and consumers. It’s opening a lot of doors for OOVA because we put a lot of emphasis on making sure our technology is superior and I think at the end of the day, that will win out over some of the marketing plays that a lot of these companies are using.
I do think there has been a bit of an over hype but it is raising awareness. Women’s health has not seen the money coming in the way that it should have and female founders are still not getting the funding that they deserve to be getting. So, I am really happy when I see news come out on not just our competitors, but also companies in the space, that have raised money or gotten high profile coverage because it’s raising awareness of problems, which in turn helps the industry as a whole.
How did you determine pricing for the OOVA testing kit? Have you found that consumers are generally receptive to paying out of pocket?
We have a starter kit which is $149.99 and a refill kit, which is $99.99 with a subscription and $119.99 for month-to month purchases. We are very comparable to the status quo because we are quantitatively measuring two hormones and it’s paired with an iPhone app that is free, consumers receive personalized insights, and the generated report can be shown to a clinician, if needed. We are also making recommendations for supplements, diagnostic testing, and daily action plans — so there is a lot of hand holding through our platform, since the ultimate goal of OOVA is to empower women with information about her own body.
What are some examples of daily action plans and personalized recommendations that OOVA would offer?
On a daily basis, we capture hormone levels and allow for women to enter any subjective information for as many variables she wants. We merge all of the data collected into our machine learning algorithm and output a personalized daily action plan. The daily action plan is composed of items related to nutritional health, emotional wellness, and physical health. The goal of the daily action plans is to help women take control of the fertility journey and regulate their hormone levels.
On a monthly basis, we provide a report that really dives into the details of hormone trends and all the data that we capture. We help to educate women on her menstrual cycle, the length of her follicular phase and luteal phase, whether she released an egg that cycle, explain why we made the recommendations we did in her daily action plans, and we provide personalized recommendations for daily supplements and additional diagnostic testing.
Can you talk a little bit about your partnerships with Mount Sinai and Thorne Research and how you see that collaboration evolving over time?
OOVA is actually a spin-out company from Mount Sinai Hospital, so they have signed off on our technology, our concept, and are supporting every step we are taking with the company, so it has really helped to add instant credibility to what we are doing. We have constant access to clinicians and have engaged with them from day one to ensure the information OOVA provides would be useful to them.
One thing that we learned was that when a woman goes to see a fertility specialist, she usually has a notebook or a folder full of information that she has gathered. What the doctors usually do is flip through that information, put it to the side, and then start from scratch. Our goal is that if a woman goes to a doctor with OOVA data, we want to influence the next step in her treatment rather than starting from scratch.
With Mount Sinai, we have really utilized this partnership for the clinical utility of the product. With Thorne, it’s a little different. Thorne is the largest clinical grade supplement company in the US that validates all of their claims. The CEO really loves what we are doing with OOVA and has a huge interest in women’s health.
A big part of your go-to-market strategy is the promotion of kit sales through Thorne and Mount Sinai — in what other ways are you looking to increase awareness and drive sales for OOVA across a broader population?
Thorne is actually building out a women's health arm of their company and OOVA is going to be the primary diagnostic that is going to be on their platform. They have three million users nationwide and 11 Olympic teams that use their product — we are getting access to an insane consumer base from day one. Thorne will be helping us sell out initial kits as well.
What was some of the common feedback you received after the beta launch and how did you incorporate this into the kit?
For the beta launch, we had 300 test strips that only quantitatively measured LH at that time. To find women that would be interested in testing out the product, I went on Facebook to some of the fertility groups that I was a member of and explained my story and the product and asked people to sign up to test it if they were interested. In less than 4 days, we had over 500 women sign up, so that just shows what the market traction is like.
After mailing out the 300 kits, the feedback that we got was overwhelmingly positive. It almost looked as though we were biasing the results in some way because the comments were so good. The main feedback was that a majority of women requested that we include progesterone into our test kit. Once we closed funding in February, we hit the ground running and did R&D for progesterone, and that’s why today, we have the only test strip in the world that measures both LH and progesterone in one.
What was the fundraising process was like for OOVA and what are your plans for raising additional capital?
It’s been a journey. When I was fundraising last time, it was right after the JP Morgan healthcare conference, so a lot of other companies in the space were there and got everyone hyped up about femtech. So once that was over and I started fundraising, people were ready to hear what we were saying.
But, what I did find was that a lot of investors either got it, or they didn’t. I got to a point where if investors I was pitching to didn’t agree that OOVA was solving a problem that needed fixing, I wasn’t going to convince them that it was.
As in they didn’t understand what the market was or didn’t understand the problem the product was solving?
Both. They didn’t understand the problem, so they didn’t think the market was big enough.
Were the investors you got push back from not too familiar with the space?
The investors were mostly healthcare focused, but what I found was that people who had gone through a similar struggle themselves or had a close friend or family member who had gone through it got it right away. Those who hadn’t, didn’t relate to the problem.
What are some examples of other markets that OOVA can expand to over the next few years?
Since our technology is agnostic to different biomarkers we can move into other areas within women’s health such as postpartum care, menopause, and pregnancy tracking. We’re eager to start looking into expanding into these areas soon!
Lastly, what advice do you have for people who are tinkering with an idea or thinking of starting their own company?
Do it! I think the biggest hesitation is self-doubt and the only way to overcome that is to jump and do it. I’m a first time founder and have no clue what I’m doing every single day, because there is only so much you can Google or read about — it all comes from experience. That being said, you really need to embrace that and be a sponge — learn as much as you can, talk to as many people as you can, be open about the fact that you don’t know everything, and try to learn as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
